The Unlikeliest Alpaca

I met the cutest puppy today. It was tucked in a duffel bug, with only its head sticking out: perky ears and a toothy little grin.

"What kind of puppy is it?" I asked the owner, as I scratched it behind the ears.

She looked at me, slightly exasperated, and said, "Kangaroo."

Professional Geek

I haven't written much in here lately, and I'll try to post an explanation for that soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to add that I've been visiting the Texas Academic Decathlon state competitions this weekend, in Houston and San Antonio, and I feel so lucky: I have a job in which I can study interesting subjects, write footnotes, meet wonderful people and share alpacas with the world.

If you're a Decathlete, or a coach, or anyone else involved in the program, thank you so much for this opportunity.

Man and Elevator

"You're welcome to it," said the man, standing in front of an open elevator door.

I figured he was going up, so boarded, noted that the "L" button (for "Lobby") was already lit, and waited a while. The elevator doors didn't shut.

"It's stuck?"

"Yeah."

"Know where the stairs are?"

He shrugged. I looked around, spotted an exit sign, then found the stairs behind him to his left. They led directly to the lobby's "Cafe by the Lake."

"Stairs work," I said. He declined to come with me, which at the time baffled me--but in retrospect, maybe he was injured.

Severe Thunderstorm

I'd never heard an emergency siren before a few minutes ago--a screeching, awful thing, evocative of my childhood nightmares about Soviet nuclear strikes. "What's that?" I asked my driver.

"It is for severe thunderstorm," he explained. "It is to warn us."

"What should we do?"

"Nothing different," he said, "It is just for knowing." He turned left toward O'Hare, hitting the brakes. I'm in no particular rush because my flight is delayed ninety minutes. "Rain turn highway into parking lot," says my driver. The wipers swish back and forth. Mostly, I want to sleep, and with my pillow here, it's hard to resist.

Writing for the Screen and Stage

Twenty years ago, I had no idea I might like to write for the stage and screen someday. In fact, I spent most of my childhood reading novels voraciously and railing against what I saw as the dangers of television. I'm embarassed to admit I once carried a math textbook with me to a performance of Phantom of the Opera.

But there were signs. Early on I was a fan of The Smurfs, Transformers, even, ah, Rainbow Brite. What kept me glued to these shows from week to week were what I now know are called “story arcs,” or plots that unfold over a long series of episodes. There was one arc in particular, in which the Smurfs went exploring the world on a great ship, that seized my imagination. Later I devotedly watched Star Trek—though I was disappointed in how predictable and self-contained most of the episodes were. I knew Picard could never develop a serious love interest, that what happened in one episode wouldn’t matter in the next.

In college, I didn’t have a television, but I was so impressed by Shakespeare that before long I wrote a faux Shakespearean play about my high school Academic Decathlon team. (Imitation is finest flattery, etc.) By my senior year, I was trying to write the lyrics for a musical set in England during the Industrial Revolution. I collaborated with a composer with whom I completed two songs; we both dreamed of writing the soundtracks for Disney movies. Later I contributed (albeit minimally) to the book for a student-authored opera on the voyage of Magellan. In a persuasive technology lab, I worked with an engineer to script the lines and personality for a prototype singing doll, Hap the Happy Bear, that would persuade children to eat more McDonald’s (I’m still uneasy about it.) Later, I created storyboards for new product ideas at CASIO. And not long ago, an Internet communications start-up, Yackpack, asked me to create monsters—in theory, as entertaining characters to converse with users of their service. (Shamefully, I never delivered them, even though I tried inventing them to the soundtrack of Avenue Q.)

In all these instances, I’ve treasured the opportunity to collaborate with others; I like to believe that my imagination, whatever its other shortcomings, has very low walls. All along I continued to think of myself as a writer of prose fiction at heart. I enrolled in short story workshops, and I enjoyed the experience very much. But my stories gradually grew more focused on exchanges of dialogue than on long passages of description and narrative. I just don’t visualize scenes that way, in strings of sentences. And once I was out of college, I began to consume—or, more aptly, gorge myself on—series that I found brilliant and entertaining: shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I had, sadly, resisted in college because of its silly name), Angel, Six Feet Under, Firefly, and, more recently, The West Wing and 24. I am in awe of those producers and writers who successfully balance an evolving storyline and complex cast of characters with the need to draw in new viewers—to keep the story from descending into self-referential soap while also maintaining dramatic momentum from episode to episode.

In my final year at the Kennedy School of Government, I was blessed with an instructor who didn’t mind my taking a different approach than the traditional policy memo. Among other things, I wrote a new chapter to the bible, in which Moses was tried for war crimes, and a dialogue between Lao Tzu and Lincoln in which they contested the nature of good leadership. In writing them—and in watching the dialogue performed—I realized again how much I enjoyed entertaining others in slightly unconventional ways.

I still don’t know exactly in what form I’ll ultimately channel all this. But I've had the good fortune of a career thus far that, while motley at best, affords me the freedom to pursue old dreams in new guises. So, today, I leave to Chicago, in said pursuit. I'm not sure what I'll find there. I figure it's time to pack a coat and see what happens next.

Teatime

This afternoon I needed tea. I was on the verge of falling asleep. Unfortunately, most of the accidents in my life involve me on the verge of falling asleep... otherwise I wouldn't have hit an invisible car earlier this summer, or dropped my cell phone in a toilet two weeks ago. So I astutely filled an electric tea pot with water, placed it on the stove, then lit the stove and strolled away.

It didn't take too long to evacuate the apartment.

An RMB Saved is an...

ATM machines are always polite, asking if you mind extra fees and never hesitating to take no for an answer, but the ones here in Shanghai are extra thoughtful. They say, "Please take cash and advice."

My advise, sadly, looked a lot like a receipt, but I couldn't tell for sure: it was in Chinese.

Tonight I walked back to my "magnificent" hotel through People's Square. There were four benches enclosing a tree at the southeast corner. On one, a young couple kissed desperately. On the bench next to theirs, a prone beggar perspired in the heat.

My hotel room has no chair, only a stool. The last hotel room I was in that had no chair was in Corpus Christi. Since I'm staying here for a few days, I decided to liberate a chair from the hotel restaurant. I'd have made it, too, if the elevator hadn't taken so long to reach the third floor that a waitress spotted me. I was duly reprimaned.

Later I decided to go by the book and asked the front desk for a chair. Smiles and nods all around. When I got back later in the day, they had delivered a second stool.

Now, if you mount two stools together and stick a pillow between them, you do sort of get a chair. And the air conditioning works. Also, there's a street full of yummy food stalls nearby--today I ate a fresh egg wrap for 2 RMB, or about 25 cents. So I'm not complaining.

Speaking of food, though, I had the best salad of my life (seriously) at a place called the Coffee Beanery near one of the schools I visited this morning, in Pudong. (The Coffee Beanery shouldn't be mistaken for the Coffee Bean, which also operates stores here in Shanghai.) Their so-called "Hawaiian Salad" was a Caesar plus pineapple, fresh chicken bits, and crunchy nuts. It was weird to eat something knowing that any salad I ate in the future would either be the best salad of my life or not as good as this one.

Alas, I doubt we'll be seeing any Coffee Beaneries opening up in California, unless they change their name--preferably to something other than the Tea Leafery.

Throughout the day, I've been editing Dean Webb's "Rest of Us" guide to Chinese history; if at any point the PRC confiscates my computer and finds the file, I might end up writing the sequel to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich instead.

Kowloon by 'loonlight

I'll admit I don't know as much about the world as I would like to. For instance, yesterday, shortly before procuring pajamas for my former Spanish teacher's grandchildren, I rediscovered that Ottawa is the capital of Canada. I feel like I discover that fact periodically, then forget it again.

In a similar way, I'm embarassed to admit that I had no idea Kowloon was in Hong Kong until I reserved a hotel here: the Ramada, which is generously described as "rustic."

I've been to a lot of Asian cities by now, and a lot of them share the "welcome to the future" aesthetic. Huge neon signs, enormous shopping malls, talking toilets, etc. But passing through Hong Kong on the train, then Kowloon on a bus, I really felt as if I'd shown up in a different century. It was New York washed in halogen and brimming with mostly Chinese people and with shops still open at 11 on a Sunday night--clothing, electronics, espresso. Buildings towered so high over narrow streets that I felt completely enclosed. A city in a cavern, with rooftops in space and lots of ATM machines.

---

I fully recommend Team of Rivals as the single best biography I've ever read.

You're Welcome

A man here in the Cathay Pacific lounge (where I'm camped out drinking tea and editing) just stopped one of the employees in front of the magazine stand.

"Is there wireless here?" he demanded, in a very pleasant British accent.

"Yes," said the employee.

"Does it require a password?"

"No, sir," said the employee.

The man walked away to rejoin his travel companion, a woman in a scarf.

"You're welcome," said the employee, softly.

---

"You're Welcome" was also the title of one of my favorite fifth season episodes of Angel, in which Cordelia briefly returns to help Angel to find his way.

Move Over, Mountain View

In fact, move over Seoul, too. The streets of Taipei have been fully "wiflied" by an ISP called WiFly, with funding from the city government. What's more, you can even roam the network using a Boingo account, though it turns out the service costs 12 cents a minute. I wish that the fine print explaining that had been in English before I blissfully used the network for five hours. Today, I've wisened up. I bought a one-day WiFly account for 100 New Taiwan Dollars (about $3 U.S.) If your path brings you to Taiwan, I recommend one. You'll be able to surf the web on taxicabs. Today, I'll try it on the subway.

It Was Only Ten Days

...and I spent the last three mostly writing my thesis. But it was something on the first night of my spring break in Taiwan that led me back to NTU today. Our hosts had taken us out for snacks at the various food stalls. We wandered in a large group, down to a street that forked at about a 45 degree angle. There was a minimart near the corner, and stinky tofu nearby. I'm not sure why I remembered that particular spot. But this morning, as I rode in a taxi to meet with the Bethany School about joining Scholar's Cup, I looked up from my laptop and saw it.

I felt that quick tingle of recognition as past and present geographies matched in my head. I timidly glanced to the right at the next intersection, glimpsed some palm trees. That was a second clue. NTU is the Stanford of Southeast Asia.

The counselor I met at the the Bethany school confirmed it: we were just a couple blocks away from the university's main entrance. After our meeting she let me me out the school's gate. As we crossed the blacktop one student asked her if she had a date. "August 25," she answered. Then a giant steel grating rolled up and out I went to Roosevelt Street.

Within a block I had passed a dark-haired man making Middle Eastern sandwiches. I remembered him; he spoke English with a French accent. A little further and there was Dante Coffee: Dante, where I'd tried to write my thesis but mostly written in this blog. And within a few hundred meters of Dante was the front gate to NTU.

Palm trees lined it. Students were biking in and out. Girls walked with umbrellas. I stood next the giant campuis map where I once asked someone if I could borrow her cell phone. I felt the flutter of an inappropriate nostalgia. I was here not ten years ago, but one and a few meager months. For some reason it felt like I was visiting a place much older in my life.

I crossed campus, poking my head in the room where once, I screamed like Howard Dean. Microphones lined all the tables this time. I snapped a photograph and in my head I photoshopped in everyone I'd gotten to know here. Our welcome breakfast too.

I walked on. The building next door to our dorm now featured a Japanese tea shop and various other restaurants. The Seven-Eleven that had sprung up there overnight had apparently been only the beginning of a larger renovation.

The dorm was mostly unchanged--even the computers were the same, in the lobby. I borrowed one to check my e-mail. The puzzled security guard objected at first, then relented when I pointed toward the stairs and said, "I stayed there." If only it were always that easy.

Not too far away, Jon and David had once stood on a table to make their closing remarks. Presumably, another HCAP group had visited since, and other closing remarks been spoken.

I'm not sure why this last year has felt so--long. I suppose it's a blessing that years feel long: it promises at least the illusion of a longer life.

To end on a less melancholy note, tonight I'll be having dinner with several of the HCAP alumni--Buddy and Tina for sure, and maybe others too. Looking forward to it. Yesterday, I saw Chuan-Mei (and devastated her bathroom)--so this trip has been a nice combination of Scholar's Cup meetings, farce (see "Down the Drain") and reunions with old friends.

Down the Drain

Last night, in my frantic packing for a flight to Taiwan, I dropped my new cell phone in the toilet.

I'll try to post more tomorrow. But a brief recap: I rushed from Taipei airport to the city of Taechng, where I saw Chuan-Mei for breakfast, then worked at a Starbucks tucked in the lingerie section of a local K-mart clone until my meeting at a local high school, Morrison Academy. I was there to invite it to join the Scholar's Cup. It went well! Several students attended, including one who claimed to have competed in the Nevada Academic Decathlon. As Nevada hasn't fielded a team in several years, I was puzzled, but decided not to protest.

Pomimo

A year ago, but only twenty entries or so as the blog goes, my family and I lost a little puppy. A vet gave her too much vaccine; she died a couple days later after clinging to life on an IV drip. We never sued the vet. We probably should have.

On the scale of things, I know losing a puppy is not a big deal. People die, some violently, many prematurely, every day. Every minute, really. Once, in China, I saw a man with a crushed skull sprawled on the side of the freeway, near a motorcycle. And another time, I stood over the corpse of my sister's boyfriend at a hospital while his mother screamed.

That was tragedy. A lost puppy may be a loss, but, surely, not a tragedy. Even when the call comes in at 3 am.

Yet even a non-tragic loss has its impact. I tasted salt. And when the breeder was kind enough to send a replacement puppy, I found her adorable too--but I didn't adore her in quite the same way. I was still grieving that non-tragic loss. That first puppy had been remarkable: spunky and at ease from the moment I picked her up at a plantation in Louisiana.

In a way, that made my summer easier. I didn't mind leaving the house as much as I would have, had that first puppy lived.

I wish my summer had been harder.

Then, one day in Xi'an, I encountered a mischievous little white dog that looked like a mixture of a Pomeranian and an American Eskimo. A crowd gathered to watch me play with it. (They were also upset that I had put my China Lonely Planet guide on the ground.) I watched that puppy leave with its owner thinking I would have taken it with me if I could.

That night, I realized I was--for lack of a better term--ready again. A google search revealed it had probably been half American Eskimo, half Pomeranian--a mixture called a "pomimo." I e-mailed a breeder. She had two small white ones available. Both had a mischievous-looking father, one a more cheerful mother. I chose her.

Last week, she arrived from Nebraska, and I brought her home to my parents. Wrapped in a blue blanket. And this puppy is not--a replacement. Either she doesn't have to keep measuring up to a puppy just lost, or maybe she just measures up very very well. She has that same spunk and ease. Whatever the opposite of a non-tragic loss is, she has become.

And yes, my family and I are a little crazy about our pets. But surely you knew that already. Just wait till I have an alpaca.

Beef Noodles

In one odd incident en route, the beef noodle soup on the flight had beef, and noodles, but no--soup. The flight attendants were mystified. One suggested the noodles may have absorbed all the water. I doubt that, though. They weren't very moist noodles.

Nanjing Road

An interesting thing about coming back with a friend to a place where you've known both pain and joy is that only the joy is there for the sharing.

Game 83

"After nine long years, this wasn't so much a celebration of what happened here. It was a celebration of simply being here." -- Orange County Register

"It started with the suit. It ended with a shot that had all 19,162 fans in Staples Center holding their breath." - L.A. Times

"A sea of red and blue overtook Staples Center, and for the first time in the seven-year NBA history of the arena, purple and gold did not dominate the look of playoff basketball in Los Angeles." - L.A. Daily News

Clippers win, 89-87.

Riverwalk

"Is it natural or manmade?" I asked a waiter at the "cutting-edge tex mex" restaurant downstairs.

"It flows in a circle," he replied.

Enough said.

On every other trip I've taken to San Antonio, which is just about annually for the Texas state competition, I never even made it to the Riverwalk. This time, I haven't left it yet. I've been tutoring an Austrian gentleman named David Schlaff for the GMAT--a test I took once after hitting my head.

The bottled water in the hotel is very pretty.

Frequent Trimmer

I'm now a member of the frequent haircuts club at the Coex Mall. "This way you collect miles," explained the cashier. "Every eleven haircuts, one is free."

I wonder if I will be in Korea enough this next year to collect one.

Counting the Ballots

A quick update: Kent is about to give a presentation to over 1,000 mothers on how their children should balance Friends, Grades, English, Entertainment, Art, Family, Culture and Exercise. I have the diagram in my hands; it looks a bit like a spider's web. He calls it "Wise Moms."

I indulged in the Election Day episode of the West Wing this morning. The result was to my liking, even if I didn't quite believe it. I expected the moderate Republic with a broken hand to win. The startling thing to me, though, was how engaged I got with it--as if states were actually being called for the different candidates. I guess there's a reason I went to the Kennedy School after all.

As for yesterday's presentation--it's too early to call the outcome. But the presentation went, I think and hope, very well. The CDI officers who attended seemed intrigued. They asked lots of questions. David and I took turns answering. If I had to guess right now, I'd say some kind of Scholar's Cup *could* happen--and the next step is... unclear. But should be more clear soon.

Strawberry Milk

Over the course of a generally feverish night, I dreamed of nuclear annihilation. The first time, I was in Chicago and saw a mushroom cloud sprout up over the lake. I think it was the middle of last year's DemiSummit. The second time, I was further from the blast and got to watch the war unfold, at least metaphorically; I saw bright lights zipping back and forth inside a cup of milk. When the lights died out, the milk turned pink.

Election Day

Monday morning, 11 am--that's 11 hours and 12 minutes from now. It's not the be-all and end-all: the meeting could go well, and Scholar's Cup not work out. Or, the meeting could go poorly, and Scholar's Cup still succeed. So many paths possible.

I go to bed a little dizzy and a lot hopeful.

Just Not My Day

I just got sprayed in my ear with cleaning solution. It was an accident involving a trashcan. I'll either have very clean ears or go deaf.

Missionaries

"Hello!" one of them said brightly, as I passed them in the mall: three well-dressed young Korean women.

"Hello," I said, not sure if I knew her.

She answered that by asking, "Do you read the bible?"

"This isn't a good time," I said, honestly, "But I do wish you well."

"Only five minutes," began another, "The bible--"

"Sick," I interrupted, gesturing toward my stomach. "Thank you, the bible is good, but where is the bathroom?"

"Aaaah." They seemed to take in my sweaty expression and vaguely doubled-over condition. I probably looked like I was doing a bad imitation of Jack Bauer craving a fix in Season Three. "That way, to the left," said the first one, pointing to the right.

It's been a long day...

Rehydration Packs

For some reason (well, I guess it's a self-evident reason, as I struggle to hold down a cup of tea) I'm reminded of the day after Paula, Karen and I finished hiking the Inca Trail. We had come down to Aguas Calientes, a small town a few kilometers from Machu Picchu, and spent the night bathing in their hot springs. The next morning Karen woke up very sick to the stomach. Paula and I searched the town looking for something to help her. All we could locate were cholera rehydration packs. I think they helped, though it took a while; we were delayed there a couple days while she recuperated.

I wonder where they are now. Last I checked, Paula was a medical student in Portland. That tends to take a while, so I bet she's still there. I don't know about Karen, though. She was a consultant in San Francisco. I've only seen her once since the night that we parted paths at a hookah bar in Istanbul.

Above the Second Cataract

I'm falling asleep, so a quick post: earlier today, at a Renaissance fair in the desert, I witnessed a pseudo-crucifixion and walked a plank. The CDO team and I also ran into an alpaca. It looked like a DemiDec cover wrought in flesh and sunlight. We asked if we could pose for pictures with it.

"Yes," said the caretaker, who told us the alpaca's name was Peru. "But you might want to give him a flower."

We got him a light green rose. I didn't realize that Peru would eat it out of my hand, but he did--happily. I've never seen an alpaca slurp before. Such big teeth!

Barbarians and fairies were also present at the fair, though like the alpaca they weren't mentioned in this year's Super Quiz curriculum.

Later I had tea with my high school Spanish teacher, Dr. Serfaty, a.k.a. "arbol," then went with her and the most recent iteration of my team to an Ethiopian restaurant, where slow service combined with excellent food, questionable jokes and an erratic paper towel dispenser. Farhan got so hungry waiting for our dinner he went next door and bought a candy bar. We nearly lost Zac to a hot green pepper.

There was also some questionable driving, not mine for a change.

I go to bed with a sunburned nose and tingly ears.

Java City Cafe

I admit it: I'm nutty about coffee shops with wireless Internet access. In the United States, that usually means a Starbucks or, in California, a Coffee Bean. I'm not sure about Caribou Coffee out in the Midwest, but still, at best, there are a few chains, and try as they might with the occasional gingerbread latte, they aren't anything special. They smell of java but reek of sameness.

Enter Korea. I'm in a shameless state of bliss. I type this entry at a Java City Cafe with about 1500 square feet of room, plump pinstriped chairs, cherrywood tables that don't look like they could be dragged onto the patio at a patron's whim. There are ten other chains with equal attention to detail. About half of them imitate Starbucks, but the others transcend it.

I hope they stay in business. But I look around and this enormous cafe is empty. The perfect lighting falls on my laptop, one man reading a book, and two couples. That might be enough to fill the corner Coffee Bean, but here, we're so far apart we could fit additional coffee kiosks between us.

And yes, Korea has those too. I photographed a few today in a futile quest for the Chinese embassy. I'll post them at the fotki site soon.

The World Turned...

In Korea, "La Paz" isn't a Tex-Mex restaurant, it's a coffee shop.

But never fear: burritos are available, from Hyundai.

Don't Know How Long This Link Will Work

Click here

Congratulations to Zac, Dean, Julia, Monica, Farhan, Atish, Michael, the two Davids, Miss Paul, and Dr. Berchin...

Shorn

One pastel smoothie bar in the CoEx Mall advertises that "we are coffee." Nearby an actual Coffee Bean attracts a trickle of patrons; behind it a larger Starbucks is crowded to the brim. As for me, I've found a Holly's Coffee about one underground block away, where I'm not sipping my green tea--since I plan to nap in a few minutes. Afterward I'll be meeting David at the thirteenth entrance to a designated subway station.

Elsewhere in the Coex Catacombs I got my hair cut. Haircuts in places where no one speaks your language are not only fun, they're low-stress: there's no need to make small talk, and I don't have to figure out how I want my hair styled, since there's no way to communicate it anyhow.

The stylist, who introduced herself as Sohyung, had an assistant whose job was to occasionally tap what looked like an eraser against my face and neck.

The Closest I've Ever Been to Hawaii

After a long absence, I'll see if I can rouse this blog back to life.

Last night I returned to Korea. On the plane, I sat next to a small Japanese man in a tophat.

I'm back to work with David Kimel to start an academic competition for middle and/or high school students. We've dubbed it (tentatively) Scholar's Cup. Our hope is that someday it would become the Scholar's World Cup. I'm convinced it could succeed, but as with many plans, it's not clear how to execute it. We'll see what happens. But something's bound to.

David found me a place to stay: the Hawaii Hotel. It's a mid-sized, perfectly rectangular black structure with small windows looking out on a construction pit. This is how he describes it:

"...in the area, very comfortable (American television, Internet access in every room, near a giant mall, etc.) and pretty cheap (about 50-60 bucks a night, if memory serves)."

I should add that it's also the most decked-out hotel room I've ever been in. There's a Sparkletts-style water dispenser. Gigantic shampoo, conditioner and body wash pumps. Shaving cream, toothpaste, something called an "emulsion." A computer with an LCD monitor. Robes. Sandals. And, tucked discreetly by the bed, two complimentary packets of condoms.

"It's a business hotel," the woman at the front desk assured me, when I asked for a discount.

I see. Business. Uh-huh.

"G for Gendetta"

Not sure why, but my gmail account was suspended overnight, for "up to 24 hours" (though you never know.) With typical google humor, it describes this as a "lockdown in sector four"; more seriously, it alleges that my account violated gmail's terms of service.

I figure one of two things did it: the e-mail I sent to coaches about the resurrected message board, or my downloading messages to Thunderbird to respond to on my way home. Since I send e-mails to coaches from time to time and this hasn't happened before, it was probably the latter. Either way, I'm probably "going dark" as an e-correspondent till it revives.

All in all, this is the perfect bookend to a trip that included my luggage visiting Tennessee, my cell phone taking up permanent residence at O'hare, my solitary confinement at an abandoned airport in Madison at 2 am, and my (brief) assignment to someone else's hotel room.

La Vida Loca

I don’t write random musings very often anymore, which maybe makes it even more cliché than usual that I would choose to write on a dark beach on the coast of Mexico. I’m sitting about twenty feet from the water. It foams but doesn’t rise very high. The Beatles are singing “Let it Be” somewhere in the nearby hotel; they’re louder than the surf. I once karaoked that song in Boise; another time, in Shanghai. The song is bittersweet enough without the memories.

I walked nine kilometers today, maybe ten. From the center of Mazatlan to this “golden” periphery peppered with motels and mid-tier resorts. I limped the last few blocks, but I don’t think it’s my age catching up to me. It seems to be more a matter of bad shoes and thin socks. Conceivably I should also exercise more.

I’m not really sure why I’m in Mexico. At least in London, I had a secret mission and could enjoy the first class seat. Here, I think I came to prove that I could follow through on a travel whim. I had, after all, just cancelled a trip to East Timor in order to work with Bill Cathers at L.A. High this coming Saturday. More than once I had driven toward the airport, then not actually gotten on a plane. So this time, I did. It wasn’t unlike my motivations for doing Decathlon the second time. Regret minimization.

Also, I had told Chuan-Mei I would come—and this was my last chance to make good on that. Of course, I had abortively visited so often that she assumed I wasn’t actually flying here and made other plans. So I’ve been wandering Mazatlan on my own. Not a bad thing. I needed the peace and quiet. I do my best storytelling with an audience, but not my best planning.

I caught the tail end of Mazatlan’s Mardi Grass. Steaming crowds of—Mazatlani?—crowding the beachfront to watch a series of floats. The floats were crawling with dancers, some disinterested, others flaunting their curves. One float was for Alamo Rent a Car. I bought a coconut pastry of some kind, which left my fingers oily, then a cup of corn kernels mashed with cream and cheese. It was tasteless, maybe because I asked them to hold the chili; I tossed it out at a pharmacy where I bought water. I had expected it to taste of Chiapas and my journey with Sanjai.

I think this moment may have made the whole overnight venture worthwhile. Writing on the beach. I’ve always been a sucker for melodrama. Yet there’s something to it. Buried in me—perhaps entombed, at this point—is still that writer who loves words more than alpacas. It takes a lot to let him out. But when he comes out—or, as he is doing now, pokes a tremulous finger through a crack in the wall—he proves that he wants to come out.

I hear threads of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in my head. Memories of the summer after my sophomore year, driving to Venice Beach to meet Sasha and Jessica. Two years earlier I had tossed a Frisbee and run back and forth through Serrania Park. At night I would sprint through a different park with Ali and Jeff. Already I already felt like that had been the distant past. It’s startling how quickly Stanford installed a wall for me between high school and the thereafter.

A lighthouse blinks in the distance. A faro. Last year, I worked for a Grupo Faro, in Quito. That almost feels like Frisbee already. The walls come up more often now. I finished the “thesis” the first couple days of April, from a beautiful hotel in Taipei—after a week of good times and transient friendships.

Taipei. China. Singapore. When did Asia begin to feel more comfortable than Los Angeles? Maybe I am a natural expatriate—or someone who needs regular doses of alien-ness. One could argue that I always feel different from those around me, and that being in a foreign country allows me to manifest that difference, shamelessly.

The Fifth Airport

When I booked my flight back from Seoul to Los Angeles, I paid little note to the stopover in Singapore. Only much later did I learn that Singapore is no closer to Korea than Los Angeles is to New York City--and that it's in the opposite direction from both of them.

Then, as soon as I boarded my flight in Singapore, the pilot announced we weren't headed straight back for Los Angeles, but for Tokyo. It was the first time I ever boarded a flight not knowing where it was going. This also meant that I flew six hours southwest from Seoul to Singapore to catch a connection six hours northeast back to Tokyo. Er. My flight path looked like a noose.

I'm still in a state of bliss from the Singaporean night markets. I wandered up and down the streets, first of Chinatown, then of Little India, stuffing myself with as many treats as possible and forgetting, bite by bite, a month of spicy pickled things.

Now I'm in LA for two full days of pupsitting while my family is away before begining my journey back to Boston (not, thankfully, via Midway Island.) So far, LA's included a concert (Josh Rouse), two maverick Israelis (www.trustedopinion.com) and a DHL man delivering my own puppy back to me.

Stopover

Writing this in the lounge on the second floor of the airport in Singapore. Eating tiny bits of ham and cheese while sipping coffee and green tea at the same time.

Fragments of a journey thus far:

My shopping marathon ran out of steam circa 3:30 am, when I abandoned Mustafa's and checked into a "napping center" at the airport. Windowless little chambers without doors, separated by shoulder-height wooden partitions. Blanket and extraordinarily effective air conditioning provided. I bought three hours of time; exactly at the three hour mark, a woman tapped my foot to wake me up. Definitely more effective than an alarm clock: I experienced a momentary adrenaline surge and prepared to defend my bunk.

Such yummy food. The approach of Chinese New Year meant that the streets of Singapore were crammed with people and booths even at midnight. Somehow, before I knew it, I was the proud owner of a red pillow displaying a happy dog. And after weeks of Korean cuisine, I was a veritable glutton--sipping from a coconut while eating dried fruits, tea-soaked eggs, mooncake, mushrooms and something not unlike mu shu pork. Also spicy Indian pancakes. Mmm. Street stalls.

I think my copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special--which I hoped would supply entertainment on the flight--lacks subtitles. Who in their right mind would broadcast a movie 90% in the Wookie language? Eeew. I counted. Ten minutes of mewling noises between lines of English dialogue that make Revenge of the Sith a veritable work of Shakespeare--most of that time filled with Chewie's little son snatching cookies, then courting death upon a balcony. The existence of Wookies would discredit intelligent design in a heartbeat.

Time to board. Farewell to the tropics--fifteen hours of seatbelt fastening and unfastening ahead...

Epiphany

I discovered tonight that when students appear to be looking up
words on their little electronic dictionaries, as often as not they're
actually playing Tetris.

Human Rights Violations

Yesterday night, three Koreans at a bar asked me if I realized what Hollywood movie star I looked like. "Here we go again," I thought. Their verdict: Ed Norton. My inner penguin was nonplussed.

Speaking of movies, I'll admit a little bashfully that I've consumed about two seasons of The West Wing since leaving London. I tend to read, and watch things, in bursts; I love seeing story arcs unfold.

Debating what to teach tonight... I'm thinking of doing "bad" leaders for a change: "Bin Laden and Buddies." Or maybe fan campaigns to revive TV shows (Star Trek, Firefly, Family Guy) as (rare?) examples of successful popular movements in modern-day America. Fictional leaders could be fun. Ooh, Ammar versus Rodrigo (from The Lions of Al-Rassan, perhaps my favorite novel.) I'm going to miss this job.

In Boston, I frequented a Korean tea shop, called Dado. So I came to Korea expecting bountiful and delicious tea. Alas, tea isn't as easy to find as I had hoped; there are coffee vending machines at every corner, and more Starbucks clones than you can shake a fist at, but tea seems to be the choice of a past generation. And not a single tapioca shop. It's clearly not Taiwan.

When I was little, I was so addicted to teatime on my family's visits to Chile that once, when we had skipped it, I was inconsolable until my grandparents agreed to serve teatime as the first course of dinner. Me, spoiled? Absolutely.

The number of camp casualties continues to increase, a fact little-noted in the Korean media. Yesterday, one girl broke a finger playing basketball during the obligatory PE hour, and another chipped a tooth running down the hall and tripping over an object (she's exercised her fifth amendment right, or the Korean equivalent, not to identify what the object was.)

In creative writing, most of the kids' short stories so far have featured murders and/or love triangles involving Katalina, usually both. (The latter suggests they might be more perceptive than they're sometimes given credit for.) In one story, another TA (the engimatic EJ) got flushed down a toilet, whereupon Katalina turned into King Kong and ravaged the town. For their final story, David and I instructed them not to include any camp personnel as characters, and to secure permission from a teacher before killing anyone. Yes, we're cracking down on free expression. It's fun to be authoritarian, even south of the DMZ.

I shared the opening of The Lovely Bones with them as an example of how to hook a reader. Not everyone knew what a salmon was (oh, how I miss sushi) but they all gasped at "I was murdered on December 6, 1973..." I'm trying to figure out why I found that novel so compuslively readable too. I think it's very much the characters (they're roomy characters; I find a place to fit inside each of them) and the smooth narrative; it's also the unique, understated yet weirdly believable point of view. I think I'm better able to suspend my disbelief regarding an omniscient narrator when that narrator is in a place where she has every right to be a little bit omniscient... yet still very human, and very young. I cringed when her father got his knee bashed in: not moving on literally made it harder for him to move. I loved the flashes of Ray's family (I forget his mother's name--Ruana?) And I was cheerfully surprised when the situation with the despicable yet frail Mr. Harvey was resolved off-stage, or at least out of focus. I wish you all a very good life.

Back at camp, the youngest student, Doyee, set his story on the USS Enterprise. He was captain, of course, implying Picard either met a grisly fate or left the fleet to perform in a Klingon version of the Christmas Carol. It's nice to know Star Trek fans survive--and continue to spawn--abroad.

To my surprise, the girl who got tortured a few days ago now walks arm in arm with her alleged torturers again. I'm not sure if I'm witnessing a great reconciliation, poor short-term memory, or the tip of some sociological iceberg.

Randy and I recently finished downloading the Star Wars Holiday Special. I won't subject the kids to it but I do plan to watch it on the flight home--probably on the Seoul-Singapore leg, as there'll be more cities nearby for an emergency landing should I require defibrillation.

Drama

A new soap opera unfolds: one of the students, a girl named Anne, gossipped about three other girls and they found out. They exacted retribution, first creating disgusting beverages for her to drink (including toothpaste), pouring what she refused to drink down her shirt, and then hitting her, etc. No word on whether they tried to make her faint. The ringleader is the youngest girl in the camp, who seems exceptionally sweet-natured but writes short stories about serial killers. Her name is Jenna. The camp coordinator is holding a summit with the TAs on what to do next.

Of Modes and Medians

I type this quick, quasi-furtive entry as students listen a practice TOEFFL oral response section playing on my laptop. From time to time they present me with their answers, which I then score on a scale of 1 to 5. Average score so far, closer to 2 than to 4. Yep, I've been called to emergency English-testing duty because one of the other teachers (the one who was going to host "Old Boy") was hospitalized for food poisoning after eating raw fish this weekend.

The Korean sashimi experience is a little different than I'm used to. Among other things, you pick your own fish.

Chicken Soup for the Expatriate Soul

Things are fairly quiet over here. I'm getting to know the town, which seems to be of uniform density. Lots of fish for sale, though no giant felines in sight, unless you count Hello Kitty dolls. In fact, several of the students keep inventing things with Hello Kitty themes, such as a Hello Kitty sandcastle mold. David has declared he would marry Hello Kitty if he could.

I'm also getting lots of practice speaking in public (a presentation a day keeps the jitters away) though the public in this case comprises 17 Korean children ages 12-15 and one camp coordinator, Kent, who nods a great deal and occasionally draws inappropriate things on the board.

I arranged to have French fries delivered in the middle of my talk on the history of McDonald's last night: edible multimedia. Every evening is turning into a kind of storytelling hour. Tuesday I did FDR; tonight is the rise and demise of the American department store, and tomorrow, maybe Ronald Reagan and the 1980s.

But--speaking of McDonald's--a quick thought on Korean food. Yesterday, Kyle knocked on my door to wake me up from a morning nap. (Eh, my mornings aren't very hardcore.) He explained that there was a very special meal in the cafeteria that he didn't want me to miss. It turned out to be chicken soup. Only in a country where nearly all the food is pickled and/or spicy would boiled chicken in plain broth be considered remarkable.

Okay, time to hike back from town to campus to prepare for tonight (and for the afternoon invention workshop--hopefully featuring no more Hello Kittiness.) It's a very pleasant n degrees below zero out there. I love my earmuffs.

Campus Store

Randy and I took a day trip there to Taegu yesterday, where our discoveries included giant chestnuts, the cleanest subway stations I've ever seen, and a "campus store" selling exclusively Harvard and Yale merchandise. They really do like Harvard here.

Accidental Daybreak

So I just woke up, showered, put on my teacher costume, and then walked out to have breakfast with the other teachers--only to discover that everyone was still asleep, except for one masked man prowling the corridors with a vacuum cleaner.

It turns out I miscalculated the time. It's not 8 am. It's 6 am. The last time I did this I was a freshman in Canaday. Similarly disorienting to realize the sun won't rise for another two hours. I now have all that time to (1) sleep a bit more, which is a more appealing prospect by the minute, and (2) perhaps more pressingly, figure out what I should teach today. There really is no curriculum. In my class, I have three girls, three boys and one TA, Kyle, with a crush on the other TA, Catalina (who helps David next door and claims descent from Confucius.)

In my case, he's not a family relation, but the students think I look like Mr. Bean.

Hello, My Name Is

I'm falling asleep in the "faculty lounge"--really, just a classroom with a chalkboard, two podiums, and a bunch of ethernet cables. Happy to report that my first class was a really good experience (at least for me--I hope for the students too.) We discussed a number of quotes--from Mark Twain to John Keats. I asked students to share personal experiences related to the quotes to break the ice. It turns one lied to his father about comic books and was caught; another poked her cousin in the eye for, er, pooping in the bathtub. One fought a schoolyard bully and lost, but won a moral victory. All talked about their images of love and beauty. Each shared a mistake. They argued the distinction between ignorance and stupidity. Michael Jordan came up (no mention of the Clippers, however.) Most of all, I think they got comfortable with one another. I'm looking forward to the next few weeks.

Heat Pump

Walking back from the welcome party, Randy and I spotted a plate of food in front of David's door.

"Look," I said, "David left pizza in the hallway."

Randy walked toward it, saying that though he wasn't hungry right now, it couldn't hurt to have some extra pizza. Then he stopped and doubled back.

"Wait," he said, "It's probably in the hallway because it's so cold out here that he's using the hallway to refrigerate it."

If Not You'll Go to Liechtenstein

The students arrive in about 3 hours, and then... the fun theoretically begins. But in the meantime, the camp coordinator, Kent, decided that it would be a good night to sneak out of the dorm (which locks up at 11 pm) and check out the night life in our little mountain town.

This translated to a bar, followed by a karaoke place, followed by another bar, where we stayed till the dorm reopened at 6 am. At the karaoke bar one of the TAs announced her boyfriend had just broken up with her, at which point several other guys in the group sought to, ah, comfort her.

While watching the requisite soap opera develop, I also learned a lot about Korean drinking games, at which it turns out I do well enough to avoid drinking. Despite being nominally in charge, Kent drank himself into a stupor, roused enough to reenact the "king of the world" scene from Titanic, then slumped back into his seat and began to snore. He also mentioned his mother a lot.

An update to come on the students and whether, in fact, Kent wakes up in time to host the "opening ceremony." If not, I might volunteer to substitute for him and offer a lyrical verse or two for the occasion. Something like,

"Welcome, students, to the camp,
we'll make you into creative champ!
Just do your work, and you'll be fine,
If not you'll go to Liechtenstein."

Shutruk Nahunte

I'm about to teach my first class. I met my students this morning. There's only six. With any luck, I'll learn all their names in a day and won't confuse them too much. In other news, the camp coordinator drank himself into a stupor last night.

Pink Down Jackets

I'm writing now from Gimpo Airport, near Seoul, at a stand available for public use by passengers on Asiana Airlines. I'm usually an American Airlines kind of guy, but this trip is an exception: Star Alliance all the way. I flew on the top floor of a 747 for the first time from L.A. to Tokyo, writing my application to an MFA program at Columbia and watching West Wing episodes for eleven hours. It was beautiful.

Alas, because I procrastinated on the application, I've only slept about 5 hours since New Year's Eve, but I'm holding up surprisingly well so far. A couple observations before my flight to Taegu boards.

As my bus--a.k.a. "airport limousine"--pulled up to Gimpo Airport, I spotted a woman in a puffy pink down jacket and white skirt standing in the middle of a crosswalk, dancing, smiling and not moving out of our way. Her cheeks were blushed bright red. Just when I was starting to wonder if she was a deranged courtesan waiting for us to run her over, she curtsied and moved aside.

The bus rolled on, and someone dressed exactly like her waited at the next crosswalk.

---

(A little girl in a blue coat just looked at me, then whispered something to her mom. I said, "hello," and she shyly responded, "hello." Her mom laughed.)

---

At the airport cafeteria, I was pressed for time. My flight was about to board on the other side of security. I must have looked hurried, because when I ordered the sushi combination platter, the woman at the counter warned me, "That will be slow. Take ten minutes."

"Ah, I said, "That won't work. How about the kimchi and pork cutlet?"

"Faster," she said, smiling, "Take ten minutes."

I ordered that. Really good. And took only eight.

The Biggest Bookstore on... Europe, Sort Of

I remember when Amazon's slogan was "The Biggest Bookstore on Earth." At the time, I quietly, maybe quixotically, favored Barnes and Noble's newer online venture, bn.com. It featured faster shipping, but mostly, it was the market underdog. Remember, I'm a Clippers fan.

Now, I swear by Amazon. They hooked me with their "prime" shipping program--unlimited second-day shipping for a flat annual fee. I'll order anything from them, even shampoo.

(I like collecting different shampoo bottles. They make such extravagant promises.)

Anyways, I digress. The point of this blog is to note that I am, suddenly, more or less unexpectedly, in London. And on my first and possibly only night here, I was drawn to the largest bookstore in Europe, Waterstone's.

I'm being charged by the minute for this connection, so I'll write more later.

Peet's

Back in Boston and settled in for breakfast at Peet's Coffee and Tea. A schizophrenic (?) man keeps saying, "Laptop is newspaper," and rocking back and forth. An employee named Lily has just told her third customer since I got here that there are no bagels here (I was the first.) The beauty of jetlag: I woke up at 7 am totally refreshed (though still fighting off a hint of Sasha's flu.)

Lisbon

En route to Lisbon via Zurich. This blog may yet be recalled to life.

Stanzas Written On The Road Between Florence And Pisa

I first encountered Lord Byron's poem as a sophomore in English class. I think there were three poems that really hit me hard in high school and that still echo in my head from time to time--this, "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," and "A Dream Deferred."

---
Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story;
The days of our youth are the days of our glory;
And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty
Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.

What are garlands and crowns to the brow that is wrinkled?
'Tis but as a dead flower with May-dew besprinkled:
Then away with all such from the head that is hoary!
What care I for the wreaths that can only give glory?

O Fame!—if I e'er took delight in thy praises,
'Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases,
Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover
She thought that I was not unworthy to love her.

There chiefly I sought thee, there only I found thee;
Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;
When it sparkled o'er aught that was bright in my story,
I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory.

Gone With The... Kimel?

I don't write here very often anymore. This is in part because I haven't been moving around much lately--but more because most of what I've had to say feels as if it would be uninteresting to people outside of my head. Posting progress reports on DemiDec releases = not so intriguing.

On second thought, I probably ought to have written something about our DemiDec retreat in Mexico, but at the time we were all so busy eating tacos and wrestling with a publication crisis that it didn't even occur to me.

They were really good tacos. It was a really good trip.

Anyway, if anyone actually still visits this blog -- thank you.

A parting pointer: www.gonewiththekimel.com.

Woof

Daniel: my heart just jumped
i accidentally knocked over the subwoofer
and it made the noise
of a very hurt dog
demidec.chen: Appropriate noise for a subwoofer...

Hiatus Coming to an End

I've been in Boston this week. I accidentally brought along hydrocortisone cream from Mexico and, in a confused moment, applied some as sunscreen. I then washed it off vigorously hoping my whole face wasn't about to deflate.

On Hiatus

Will return once DemiDec is published.

Not Vanilly After All

Mini is resting comfortably on her first evening in town.

Not Fade Away

I should share why we named little Milly little Milly: because just then, when I had woken up my mom to wish her a happy birthday, we decided it was a little miracle that she had recovered and would be coming home in the morning--and the Spanish word for miracle is milagro.

Little milagro = little Milly.

Sometimes, life presents timing so ironic that it sounds like a screenplay someone's writing at a Starbucks.

But I have some good news. The breeder, Julie, in a very considerate gesture, is sending us Milly's sister on Tuesday. She'll have some big paws to fill, but we look forward to her arrival.

And Craig suggested the perfect name: Vanilly.

Didn't Make It

Just got the call. Little Milly died at almost exactly the moment we finished naming her...

Mysterious. Serious. And Better.

Happy to report that vet's update today is that Mitty/Tuaca/Sitka is doing a little better--upgraded from critical to serious. She's no longer minute-to-minute, in other words, and the real problem is that they still haven't figured out what's wrong with her (or her kidney.) Still, I'm optimistic, and hopefully she'll be able to come home soon and resume chewing things.

"Critical But Stable"

So says the puppy hospital. If she makes it through the night, she might make it, period. So I'm guardedly (and perhaps unjustifiably) hopeful.

Too Short a Stay

If she doesn't make it, my family and I will have had the most awesome pup ever for the shortest possible time. And if she lives, she'll be not just the most awesome but the most spoiled, too. Heck, she can have the giant alpacas.

Oopsie? Blizzard? Taro?

Doppio? Igloo? Bear?

Boba? Fuji? Stormy?

Casio?

Wounded Dell

Tonight my laptop screen fell off -- but only halfway. What amazes me most of all is not that it broke (it's mine, after all) but that it's still working, even with a half-amputated display.

Tremendous thunderstorms all evening long. If I were Charles Dickens, I'd describe it as a night full of symbols and portents for the future. Since I'm not, I'll instead note that I had dinner with my cousin's boyfriend's older brother. There's family, there's extended family, and then there's... my cousin's boyfriend's older brother.

A Tale of Three Taxis

I inspired two taxi drivers to fight today. One pulled the other out of his car and punched him. The other whacked back. Nothing too fancy, just your typical sidewalk brawl. Not because they each wanted me as a client, but because each wanted the other to take me instead. The people behind me in line were much older, wore jewelry, and didn't carry backpacks. They probably looked like better tippers. While the two of them brawled, I walked down the street to a third taxi.

This driver, a Russian man, waved at the fight. "America wonderful country," he said, "But sometimes too much freedom."

The Demise of a Dropout

My Final Return to Harvard University
or
scribblings on an airplane

My friend Sasha, who ran away to Europe to become a composer and buy a house in Belgium, would warn me against using the word "final" too loosely. "You've said it before," he'd say, "And look where you are now."

He's right. I've always been too aware of endings--even of endings I've invented ahead of time, to mark progress in a life that has been more spiraling than straightforward. As a second-grader, I used to be sad that I would never be a first-grader again.

But he's also wrong. Because while from time to time I may still walk the streets of Cambridge (no doubt observing the increasing dominance of chain stores), and will undoubtedly have many more chances to pass through the Yard and study my Canaday A-13 window before some daring university president finally knocks the building down to make way for something less depressing, I have no reason to believe I will ever be back as a student.

Perhaps as a fellow. Or even a professor. These seem remote prospects, but I've learned not to discount the remote: in almost every case it's only a hop and a bus ride away. That's how I found Patzcuaro, a town in the Mexican mountains where I wrote parts of my undergraduate thesis. Arguably that's how I founded DemiDec (though you'd have to substitute a jaywalk and a Chevy Blazer for the hop and the bus.)

As I write this, I'm flying across the Midwest. A few minutes ago we crossed over Chicago; I looked out the window just in time to see it disappearing into the Great Lakes.

I have a template I ought to be designing, for Resources. I have poems that I kind of feel like writing, old-style sonnets, the sort that I like to utter now and then in cheesy homage to past greats (and, more than that, just because I love the way rhymes sound.)

But nostalgia has the upper hand for now.

The first time I flew to Boston, I did so with a teammate, Becky, and her mother. One week earlier we had won nationals, eaten Reuben sandwiches and--to the best of my knowledge--said our farewells to Decathlon. I brought along a trenchcoat. It seemed like the appropriate thing to wear. The next day, I would be standing on the steps of a dorm feeling the wind lift it a little, pondering whether I could spend four years in this place full of bricks and homeless men, when a student unexpectedly approached me with a psychic flash.

"I know what brings you to Harvard," she said. "You want to be a writer."

Maybe I looked the part: hands in pockets, studying the grass, at a slight remove from everyone else. Or maybe everyone who goes to Harvard either wants to be president or a writer of prose, and I just clearly wasn't the former. I was still digesting the import of a year in which M Building defined the outer limits of fun and purpose. Those limits were busted, the purpose fulfilled, the fun captured in an album full of anecdotes. It seemed reasonable to imagine that anything was within reach, if I only designated to it the same passion that had helped my teammates and I find our way, via mischief and, well, mostly more mischief, to New Jersey.

...to be continued...

The Unknown Enemy

"I don't like avocados," said Su, as he slipped a slice of pizza covered in avocado slices toward his mouth. The three of us were sitting outside at the below-mentioned "Sicilia Fresh."

"So," I said, "You dislike a food you don't recognize?"

Suddenly suspicious, he stopped before biting down.

Goats and Rhinoceri

Reading about this odd couple brought me a spark of morning "awww" after an all-nighter devoted to DemiPlanning.

My Last Column

At dinner tonight, a high school senior was aghast at the idea of someone going to Europe on her own. “It would be like—like driving without a cell phone,” she said to me, between bites of a BLT. “So dangerous!”

Having both gone to Europe on my own and driven for years without a cell phone, I felt lucky to have lived this long. And I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I got my first ticket (for an illegal left turn) driving out of the cell phone shop parking lot.

Yes—I was playing with the buttons.

Only one person I knew had a cell phone in high school. His parents used it to track him down at night, thereby interrupting our breakfasts at Denny’s and our various exploits with the school keys. They made up for it by taking us out to sushi.

Now I carry my phone everywhere (though I’ve resisted PDAs and iPods, both of which are bound to eventually become part of our cell phones anyways.) When I graduate from the Kennedy School in two weeks, I’ll be traveling with it to Boston on a flight I booked at www.aa.com, staying with it at a hotel I pricelined™ and carrying a laptop with a Verizon wireless card on the same account, for broadband access anywhere in the city.

Nowadays, this sounds passé. But then I look back again, and remember that I didn’t even have an e-mail address until I got to college.

The first day of orientation week, I shot off a message to a friend at U.C. San Diego. We had been told that starting college meant losing touch with almost everyone in your past life. That wouldn’t happen to us, my friends and I figured: this new e-mail thing would keep us connected.

It mostly did. I think we remained more closely-knit than if we had gone our separate ways just a couple years earlier. I can only imagine how much more true that might have been if we’d had livejournals, free nights and weekends, and the Facebook.

I only discovered the World Wide Web at the start of my sophomore year. It was a barren place. No Napster, just a few pioneering class web sites, hardly any flaming. Amazon was two months old—and had been around several weeks longer than Internet Explorer. The term “cable modem” made us think of modems with cables sticking out of them, and DSL sounded like some kind of foreign shipping company. Hotmail was what happened when you sent a letter to Arizona.

But it wasn’t just the Internet that was different then. Californians had only recently discovered the appeal of blending fruits, yogurt and ice to make smoothies (to the delight of a fledgling company called Juice Club.) The SAT still had antonyms (I never understood why they went away.) Bookstores were places where people bought books. “Is” never meant anything but is, and an animated movie signified something hand-drawn, not Shrek but Beauty and the Beast. Airlines served meals and your parents could walk you to your departure gate. Buffy hadn’t slain any vampires yet—at least not on TV.

There were no TVs in Tressidder, let alone flat screens—and, alas, by the time they were installed, Buffy wasn't slaying vampires anymore. You had to file paper forms to get pretty much anything done, from transcript requests to selecting your classes. The parking lot didn’t take credit cards. And people who regularly snacked on froyo from the now defunct CoPo were busy founding companies with equally Stanfordish names—like Yahoo.

By now I probably sound primeval. But I graduated from Stanford not that long ago, in 2002 (true, I took two years off along the way.) Some of you were around then; you probably remember how poorly cell phones worked on campus even at the start of the 21st century. None of this was very long ago.

Still, there are times when I look back at my original Stanford days (because there are bound to be more) and miss that palpable sense of opportunity in the air, that feeling that tomorrow hadn’t been shaped yet—and that we would be the ones to shape it. Every few days it seemed another friend had left Stanford to join a start-up—or had come back post-IPO to recruit the rest of us.

Then I remember that Stanford’s probably always been that way and undoubtedly still is. Our "wind of freedom" continues to blow towards the future (though not always towards Washington) and from our place on the Farm (or the Arrillaga Alumni Center) we get to help make the weather.

---

This fall, Daniel Berdichevsky will be traveling overland (on his own, but with a cell phone) from Malaysia to Madrid. For details, e-mail him at dan@demidec.com.

Sicilia Fresh

I'm writing DemiDec "letters of engagement" at a restaurant that looks suspiciously like Baja Fresh, right down to the white lacquer tables, except it serves Italian sandwiches, pizzas and salad. There's even a salsa bar, which features coleslaw (I wish it had gelato.)

There's wireless Internet, and to the side of the restaurant is an integrated coffee shop with its own tables, Starbucks-style. That's where I'm working. The chairs have cushions.

At the table next to me, eight women are holding a knitting party.

* * * a few minutes later * * *

One of the women, her hands moving quickly, is talking about how her two dogs, Spike and Ernie, died within a month of one another: the first of of lung cancer, the second of diabetes. I can ignore Starbucks music, but this I can't help but listen to.

Now, another is talking how her dog got cancer. "They amputated his leg to get rid of the tumor. But the chemo was so expensive that my husband would go to Tijuana every few weeks to buy the drugs. They were much cheaper there."

A third chimes in. "Mine died, too. Glaucoma and then kidney failure."

Someone else tries to change the subject by saying, "I like this sweater."

Doesn't work. "I had a cat who got cancer after having a deworming shot," interrupts a fourth. Everyone expresses outrage. "Yes," she confirms, "A deworming shot. It became a fast-growing cancer, and they couldn't close the wound. At the time, I took him to a pet oncologist and he'd never seen an animal come down with this after a deworming shot..."

This is apparently turning into a pet loss support group. I may need to leave before I ask if I can learn to knit with them.

Quiet Days

Today I met a Polish plumber. He cut my dad off in the middle of his describing exactly why he wanted more water in the toilets. For this, I was thankful.

Earlier I visited with the USC/MAST Decathlon team. They fed me delicious chips and salsa. "We don't want to be forgotten," their coach explained, and I don't think they will be. They're starting early and are poised to have a tremendous year.

This made me giddy yesterday--the opening to The Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy. My friends Ali and Igor basically fell asleep during the rest of the movie, but I was won over by the rhyming dolphins and never looked back.

...the world's about to be destroyed /
there's no point getting all annoyed...

Now, if it had been alpacas singing and doing backflips, I might have died last night a happy man.

Faro and Away

As I drove away from a house that was sort of a home this morning, the radio played a couple lines by the Eurythmics:

Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory.

The rain was actually yesterday, and here I was wearing sunglasses and pondering a dash to the beach, but it still seemed fitting.

Link to my latest column at the Stanford Daily: http://tinyurl.com/coykf. It may be interesting to compare how it's published with how I wrote it.

I just finished reading Spin, a novel in which mysterious forces shield the Earth, then accelerate time all around it, so that for every year that passes on the surface, a hundred million pass in outer space. Imagine: in just 40 years the sun would be expanding into a red giant. We're talking serious global warming.

The author, Robert Charles Wilson, is masterful at coming up with interesting "big ideas." It used to be that his characters, his plots and his endings didn't measure up to them. Now his characters and his plots do, and his endings are quickly catching up. Between Spin and The Runes of the Earth, the muse in me is stirring again.

Last quick (but important) update for the day: I learned this morning that I passed my thesis. My advisor's comments were kind, and her criticisms valid:

This is not necessarily a traditional PAE in that there is not an obvious theoretical framework - a gap I lament. Moreover it must also be said that during the process of researching and writing his PAE, Mr. Berdichevsky availed himself only very occasionally of faculty input. However, having said this, it is also the case that he is a gifted writer, a smart student, and an entrepreneur who in this case was clearly committed to his client, Grupo FARO. It should further be said that his final product, tellingly titled, "As Faro As I Can See," is full of practical recommendations, tactical and strategic insights, and also some cautionary notes which, under the apparent circumstances, seem entirely justified. Because Mr. Berdichevsky is so gifted in so many ways, I would not claim that this document represents his best work. It's less deep than it might have been, less well organized in its overarching framework, and less far reaching in its implications than would ideally have been the case. Nevertheless, it's professional and practical. And, from the evidence at my disposal, it's seems the client came out well ahead, and was in general satisfied with, and grateful for, the relationship.

Which means I'm really graduating in three weeks (!) and that it's time to start looking toward next Fall, when for the first time in several years I won't have school to attend. I'm tentatively planning an overland journey from Malaysia to Madrid.

Dry Erase Pen on the Door

This is it. The last time I'll sleep in this house. I've never really known it that well, as I've mostly been in Boston and in the Bay Area since my parents moved in five years ago--but there's still a lot that's happened here for me.

I watched the 2000 Election, witnessed 9/11, rooted for the Clippers. The neighbor and I once had a serious disagreement about shrimp. Mike, Steve, Sheldon and I gave birth to a board game in the bedroom. Misty bit a magazine salesman at the front door, and years later died in the kitchen. And, of course, much more. It's odd, though: a lot of the things I remember about this place are the places I left it to, from great trips to grad school.

I didn't get to say goodbye to my Cambridge apartment. It was rented to a new tenant while I was in Taiwan finishing my thesis (which was not on Taiwan.) Perhaps better that way: a clean break, free of seeing the shelves empty, the boxes piled up.

Inevitably, a lot of things turned up in the process of packing. Among them, my sophomore year roommate's missing keys (sorry, Sasha), a CASIO check I forgot to deposit (henceforth a high-opportunity-cost souvenir, not unlike my CASIO experience overall), and my tenth grade journalism ID (I had poofy hair.)

Column Six

Three weeks ago, I was nearsighted. Once I would have had little choice in the matter. A few laser bursts later, I see 20-20.

I’ve heard innovation in science and technology described as the process by which the impossible becomes possible, the unimaginable imaginable, the unprofitable profitable. These things may be as true as they are grandiose; I don’t presume to judge. But here’s my take: innovation, and “progress” in general, steadily shrink the role of the arbitrary in our lives.

Flat irons straighten hair, perms curl it. You can have longer fingernails in about five minutes. Air conditioning makes it possible to live (and die) in Las Vegas. Perfume, deodorant and Listerine strips let us choose how we want to smell.

Electric lights allow us to achieve sleep deprivation. Cell phones and the Internet (Facebook, anyone?) mean our friends aren’t just limited to people who live nearby (though it doesn’t seem to reduce the incidence of dormcest.)

Not even the day someone’s born is completely arbitrary nowadays. Sure, you have no control of it—unless you’re very spunky in the womb—but expectant mothers can schedule C-sections for particular days, and now that the mystery of conception is a little less mysterious, many couples try timing pregnancies to fit larger life agendas.

Web sites where you can “virtually hunt” have been in the news lately. You select an animal you want shot, and the company does it for you. It’s ghastly—but it’s in keeping with innovation’s erosion of the arbitrary. Why let the fact that you live in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan stop you from terminating an elk in Missouri?

People change their names. There’s even a newly-minted Jesus Christ with a driver’s license in Washington, D.C.

People change their faces. Makeup has allowed this for years, but now we have Botox, facelifts, rhinoplasty, photofacials and whatever Michael Jackson did. Sooner or later there’s bound to be a pill to stop hair from going white. In the meantime, there’s dye.

People change their heights. Children can opt for growth hormone, and adults for surgery—a painful procedure, involving the intentional breaking of bones, but in a world where higher shoulders correspond to higher salaries, maybe not an absurd one.

People can even change their gender. Their moods. Their attention spans. The sizes of their various parts.

First cable TV supplied us more choices; now DVRs permit us to watch what we’ve chosen whenever we want to watch it (VCRs once promised the same but nobody could program them.)

Our location and local climate no longer limit what we can eat. Fast shipping and good refrigeration give us apricots in February and cheesecakes as far as UPS can ship them.

So when I consider what future innovations may bring us, I look toward the things that are still more arbitrary in our lives. For instance, Red Bull notwithstanding, we still have to sleep. Someday we may see treatments that reduce how much.

To some extent, we’re still limited in where we go to school by where we live, and we’re still limited in where we can live by how much we own or who we were born to. E-learning promises to give us more choices no matter what our location or economic condition. Controversial political innovations, such as vouchers, address the same issue.

We can’t control the weather—but once we couldn’t predict it, either. We can certainly change it (see global warming) and someday we may be able to do so intentionally. For instance, scientists have been working on ways to divert hurricanes and to seed rainstorms during droughts.

The fact that most of us can’t learn languages as well as native speakers past a certain age—and that we don’t get to choose the language we natively speak—is arbitrary. Tools and treatments to allow genuine language mastery later in life would be a hit, and not just with expats, church missionaries and the spy industry.

Studies have shown that on average people tend to be attracted to others who look a little like them. But why should the length of someone’s second toe (which correlates closely in married couples) make a difference in your choice of life partner? “Love at first sight” is the most arbitrary thing of all. Companies already sell perfumes laced with pheromones that claim to increase your physical desirability. Someday, someone is going to hit on the right formula. On any given night you may be able to choose not only how attractive you are, but what kind of mate you want to attract.

A hot debate in politics, one that may have helped sink John Kerry in the final presidential debate, is whether or not people choose their sexual orientation (in other words, whether it’s arbitrary or discretionary.) So far science has weighed in on both sides, and this isn’t going to stop anytime soon.

What definitely isn’t arbitrary is whether technology ought to keep pushing newfound options into every nook and cranny of our lives. We should pause more, evaluative and decipher an innovation’s significance. Drugs aren’t the only things that have side effects. Maybe some things are better off within the realm of choice—but maybe others, like our children’s hair color or the age when they enter puberty, shouldn’t be.

Of course, even all-holds-unbarred innovation ultimately runs headlong into some immutable arbitraries of life.

Men can’t bear children (with one notable exception who can’t run for president because of where he was, arbitrarily, born.)

We can hide it, but we still grow old.

We can defer it, but we still die.

Did I say these things were immutable? I take it back. I’ve imagined them (and I’m far from the first one) so they aren’t unimaginable. They may sound impossible, but so was FedEx, once. And they’re bound to be profitable.

Notes on Harvard

My family is moving, which means I'm packing boxes and finding old things. Tonight I came across the notes I wrote when I first visited Harvard as a pre-frosh. Here are some excerpts...

* * *

The good: Freshman accommodations generous, campus beautiful, free long-distance calls for pre-frosh. Food not unpalatable. Lunch area very polished. Well-versed professor. Spring weather.

The bad: My host was late and very hungover. Some people look unfriendly. Some dorms remodeled, many not. "It takes six months to develop friendships." -- Stranger #1. "The change in culture and climate can be a shock." -- Stranger #2. Limited conversation at lunch table, almost a reluctance. See no fire, only ice.

* * *

I flip on. The notebook is filled with my small, black script. Different pages are dated different years. Here and there, an e-mail address. Physics notes. A blank page labeled, "Notes on AP Government." A story sketch titled, kind of pretentiously, "For Peace to Endure." Notes on health, from when I took it with my running coach over the last six weeks of high school (it was that or not graduate.) Diary entries from each time I visited Harvard, for whatever reason, between when I left as a freshman and when I returned for grad school. One of them leads off with, "What you leave behind can find you again." On another page, I lament the loss of Baja Fresh's original "to go" dishes. I flip again, and find an equation: "E equals h times v." Next to it, a quote from my friend and teammate Sage Vaughn, now an artist: "Creative ideas are sown in the soil of noncomformity."

The Replacement (Not)

Apparently a local raccoon (or maybe a carbs-obsessed coyote?) realized we were short a pet and nominated itself as Misty's successor.

I was up late (still am), reminiscing a bit, writing a bit, when I heard noises coming from the kitchen. This didn't exactly cheer me up. So my mother and I went down to investigate. Nothing there. We returned upstairs.

About fifteen minutes later, the noises resumed. We all went down again, and this time I admitted to myself that maybe I was still a little afraid of ghosts. After all, this was the same kitchen.

But if it was a ghost, it must have been a very hungry ghost. We found shreds of Chilean ayuyitas (sort of like biscuits) all over the counter. It's nice that the pet door is still getting some use. Nonetheless, we reject the nomination.

The Only Explanation

I've been thinking, and I've concluded Misty must have been at least one-tenth alpaca; nothing else could explain how cute she was.

Sunday Night

In the end, she didn't make it. My dad and I just found her, stiff but peaceful, in the kitchen.

When the Mist Recedes

I wish more of you had met Misty when she was younger--even just a year ago, when she could still climb the stairs and jump up and down like a kangaroo. Now she is dying. Several times a day she goes into convulsions, then falls over. Sometimes she yowls: a cry of pain as if she were being eaten by the neighborhood coyotes (the sad fate of many pets in Porter Ranch each summer.)

It's been a sad week, in a cumulative sort of way. I could see 20-20, but one of my grandfathers went blind for ten minutes--most likely a small stroke. My grandmother suffered a stroke, too, a larger one, or a combination of several, and lost the ability to walk. My mother flew to Chile to spend the weekend with them. That left me Misty. And I want her to live long enough for my mother to get back and say goodbye.

* * *

In happier news, I attended a political rally yesterday. John Kerry came to Valley College to endorse Antonio Villaraigosa. In many ways it felt like a leftover bit of the 2004 campaign. Bush-Cheney supporters showed up chanting "four more years" and flaunting anti-Kerry signs.

At one point, the microphone blew out. Kerry continued to orate, in his kind of clumsy, kind of affable way, for a few mute seconds before realizing no one could hear him. The crowd grew uneasy. The Bush-Cheney chanting grew louder. Then a man with a shock of white hair and a considerable tummy stepped forward, lifted his hands, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner.

Everyone took it up--and while that melody of hope and pride drifted off-tune through a warm spring afternoon, the Bush-Cheney supporters quietly exited stage left.

Saluting South Carolina

I don't often post about current events, but in light of my apparent graduation from a School of Government, I thought I'd dip my feet in the pond.

First, you may have heard about recent Republican moves toward preventing Democrats from fillibustering (i.e. prolonging debate indefinitely) in order to block certain Bush appointees to the federal courts. Some conservatives, apparently including the Speaker of the House, have been making the case that Democratic senators who oppose Bush's nominees are really just against people of faith--and that these Democratic senators must themselves lack faith.

I therefore admire Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina for urging flat-out that this stop. Sunday, he said on Fox:

"What I do not want to do is cross the line and say those who oppose these nominees are people who lack faith. I don’t believe that. I don’t think that’s appropriate."

* * *

In other news, the bodies of two children were found in a pool of sewage in Georgia. Investigators are still not sure if foul play was involved.

Right. Because children drown themselves in sewage all the time...

Between this and the train disaster in Osaka, it's been a sad day out there.

"...your invisibility notwithstanding..."

My Kennedy School advisor wrote me today to say, "It will please you further to know that your invisibility notwithstanding, I gave your PAE a [passing] grade."

I'm grateful. To her, to FARO, to the friends of HCAP, to everyone else who helped me finish my second thesis on schedule for a change.

What's more, I think this means... with or without a bibliography... I'm actually graduating.

Column Five

I was lucky to attend an elementary school where the teachers served us trail mix during standardized tests. I came to think of them as an opportunity for snacking. But years later, when I took my GRE on a computer, the administrators forced me to stash my trail mix in a locker. Either they were worried I had written vocabulary words on the peanuts or that I would spill on the keyboard (given my history, the latter would be a perfectly reasonable fear.)

At any rate, computers permit more than just taking traditional tests on a screen; they enable entirely new testing methodologies. Thus, the GRE and the GMAT are now computer adaptive, which means that they get harder when you answer questions correctly and easier when you make mistakes. This allows them to pinpoint your score by seeing how far up or down you diverge from the performance of an “average” test-taker.

Such a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure approach to test administration may be more efficient, but it also introduces new sources of test-taking anxiety. For instance, you can’t go back and change your previous answers, or skip tough questions and return to them later. In fact, you can’t skip questions at all. Worse, if an easy one comes up, it’s cause for panic—since you must have done something wrong to deserve it. And if you get an incredibly hard one, that’s great!—except you may not be able to answer it.

This new emphasis on computerized testing may explain why after 27 years, the nation’s leading producer of mechanically-scored paper testing forms, Scantron Corporation, spun off a new business unit to explore opportunities on the Internet. This unit’s products have included web-based software that allows students to “take their tests online or on paper”—a clear concession to the growing popularity of Internet testing, and one sure to strike fear in the heart of #2 pencil manufacturers.

It’s one thing to have computers decide whether you answered “b” correctly and then adjust the next question accordingly. It’s another for them to score the quality of your prose. In Michigan, computers are doing just that, grading sixth graders’ essays. One company, Pearson Knowledge Technologies, offers products employing “Latent Semantic Analysis” to perform “automatic writing assessment.” Pearson claims that its software, unlike human graders, never gets tired or bored. It even rates essays for style.

I do agree that essay test responses should be typed whenever possible. Nowadays people grow up using word processors that allow them to cut-and-paste; it seems awkward to test them on a skill (straight-through-writing, for lack of a better term) that they don’t practice very much. Typed responses also eliminate potential bias against students with bad handwriting.

But in life, we don’t write for computers (unless we’re in the CS department.) Computers don’t shop at bookstores. They don’t really understand the difference between the verse of Walt Whitman and that of a Stanford Daily columnist who dabbles in rhyming ditties. Do we really want our sixth graders conditioned to write text in a way that will satisfy a software algorithm?

I’d rather consider existing problems in multiple choice testing and look for new ways to resolve them. For instance, some current standardized exams aim to penalize guessing by deducting a portion of a point for a wrong answer. However, most test-takers are still advised to guess as much as possible, particularly if they can eliminate at least one answer choice.

Instead of a straight-up guessing penalty, I propose introducing a new aspect to multiple-choice testing: a “certainty factor.” If it were implemented, you would be able to choose not only your preferred answer—a, b, c, d or e—but also how certain you are of it—20, 40, 60, 80 or 100%. If you were 100% certain and you got it right, you would receive full credit—say, 1 point. If you were only 60% certain and you got it right, you would only receive 0.6 points.

Conversely, if you were 100% certain and got it wrong, you would incur the full wrong-answer penalty—perhaps 0.5 points. But if you were only 40% certain and got it wrong, your penalty would shrink to 40% of 0.5, or 0.2 points.

This kind of testing would require students not only to know something, but to consider how well they know it. Critics might complain that this makes test-taking too much like gambling. I disagree—it’s simply a formalized extension of what is already taking place every time someone decides to make a guess. Furthermore, the testing process would teach important lessons in risk management and decision-making—and significantly reduce the possibility of people who are naturally "good test-takers" guessing their way to a high score.

Are certainty factors the future of testing? I’d love to say yes, but I know it’s not too likely. I’ll give it… 20%.

Daniel Berdichevsky hopes his editor doesn’t run this column through “Latent Semantic Analysis.” He welcomes e-mails at (a) dan@demidec.com, (b) demidec@gmail.com and (c) dberdich@stanfordalumni.org.

March 2001

A long time ago, I didn't know what a blog was, but I sort of had the idea: I would write travel update e-mails from different places. I just found four of them, from Turkey and Georgia, and posted them here. They're probably more fun than eye surgery. If you're interested, you can click the March 2001 archives in the lower left.

Rereading them reignited my wanderlust. And early May 2005 sounds like a good time for a trip...

E-mail and IQ

I just read an article on CNN.com suggesting that checking e-mail during the workday lowers IQ relative to checking it less frequently.

This is troubling... maybe if I play Mozart I can counter the effects.

The Rain is Gone

Saturday morning. Last night, I lost the archetypal struggle between "man and bed" as follows:

Bed: "Come here."
Me: "Yes, but first..."
Bed: "Come now, or I'm going to start tossing your pillows out the window."
Me: "Good try, but I know better: a bed can't toss a pillow. No hands."
Bed: "Try me."
Me: "Umm..."
Pillow: "Help!"
*distant plopping sound*
Bed: "One down. Two to go."
Me: "Aaah! Okay, I'm coming. Please, anything, but not the pillows..."

Thank Apu Pinchau (Incan creator-god of the alpaca) I was able to escape the clutches of "bed" around 7:30.

* * *

I'm sipping Earl Gray tea made with an infuser. Thank you, Sun and Julia, for reminding me of Captain Picard's favorite brew. I picked it up at Whole Foods yesterday in a massive tea-acquisition expedition, from which I also came home with white, green and decaf vanilla maple.

* * *

So, I've promised a post about what the LASIK procedure was like, and it's time to deliver.

Before the procedure began, my mother and I waited in the "Freedomvision" lounge watching the TV talking heads debate the new pope's "hard-line" views. After a while, I lost interest and instead admired the letter "v" in the Freedomvision logo. It looked like a bird. Not all birds have good vision, but eagles do, so I was reassured.

Eventually my doctor's younger colleague, Dr. Shaw, came down to greet me. He is an energetic man of Indian descent, and looks about 25. "I'm here to give you your Valium," he said.

I thought the Valium was optional, I said.

"It is," he explained, "But you really should take it."

He then lectured me on the benefits of being sedated. When he was done, he smiled like a defense attorney who had made a very good case, or Garfield after eating lasagna.

"Thanks," I said. "But I think I'll opt out."

He walked off, disgruntled. A few minutes later he returned with Dr. Gordon. "So. you taken your happy pill yet?" asked the older optometrist, fixing his eyes on me, one bright, one dull (from two different procedures.)

"Two weeks ago, you said it was optional," I reminded him.

"Yes," he admitted. "But you really should..."

"I've spent the last two weeks preparing to come in today in a state of--" I gestured up then down with my hands, thinking of Weber, Cathers and the team from Granada Hills--"High energy and low anxiety. I don't need it."

Or at least I didn't till you all started pressuring me to take the darn thing, I thought.

The standoff continued for a little while. I asked if the Valium would improve the chances of the procedure working out. No, he said, it's really for afterward, so you just go home and sleep.

"I'm sleep-deprived enough that won't be a problem," I said. (I didn't tell him my plan was actually to go home and blog.)

At last they relented, and it was time for the actual procedure.

It began with Dr. Gordon putting little marks in my eyes. "I can write any initials you like," he offered. "They'll be very small but last a few years."

I thought about it for a while. "D and D," I said. For DemiDec.

"Okay," he smiled.

There were, of course, no initials. He just put dots in m eyes. But I give him credit for fooling me with the straightest face you can imagine.

Then I walked into a larger room full of equipment, the lead surgeon (Dr. Elkins), a nurse (Laura), and a teddy bear (whom I named "alpaca.")

"Is the bear here to squeeze or something?" I said, amused.

"Exactly," said the nurse, and handed it to me.

At first I was skeptical, but it turned out that squeezing a bear when someone is slicing a flap in your eye is a really really good idea.

The slicing itself was the most painful part--or, rather, the setup involved. Dr. Elkins placed a suction cup in my eye, and then a circle of bright white lights began to whir. The cup was so highly-pressurized that I went blind right after it came on. The whole world shrank away into darkness faster than I could blink (not that I could have blinked if I'd wanted to--they'd pinned up my eyelids.)

Each eye then took 40 very long seconds to perforate; fortunately, the second one went faster when I began (very quietly) reciting poetry.

The weirdest part (for lack of a better description) was when the surgeon pulled back the flap with a tiny edged instrument. I could see my whole field of vision slowly floating away and to the right. Then when it had been totally removed, I could see straight ahead again, but only very blurrily. "Air bubbles," explained Dr. Gordon.

The actual LASIK part was easier (as opposed to what they call "Intralase"--the removal of the flap.) I had to stare up at (in their words, "fixate" on) a bright red light which flickered for about 20 seconds. The hardest part was seeing it with my right eye--everything was just a pale smear. With my left, the light was a beautiful, fixed point, like a red giant from this year's Super Quiz curriculum but without any contradictions.

I smelled something burning; I decided not to ask what.

Between eyes Dr. Gordon said, "You're doing well, Daniel."

"Thank you, Dr. Gordon," I said, politely.

The nurse then said, "You're doing well, Daniel."

"Thank you..." I began, and realized I had lost her name.

"Laura," said Dr. Gordon.

"Thank you, Dr. Laura," I said. Then my second eye caught fire and I went back to squeezing the teddy bear.

When the procedure ended, I stood up slowly. The world was bathed in milk--but painlessly so. Within an hour it felt as if I had a giant eyelash trapped beneath my right eyelid. I took a quick nap, watched The Hostage, and then pondered how to sleep with goggles on. (Still haven't figured that out, and three nights to go.)

By the next day, I could see 20-20 out of my left eye. My right one is still catching up, but already the world is an amazingly clear place--reading license plates is particularly fun--and to celebrate I've been drinking lots of tea (though not eating any meatballs.)

* * *

Just scheduled an appointment at the DMV for this Thursday. I need a new license that doesn't require me to have corrective lenses. It might be the first time in my life I'm happy to visit the DMV.

A Thought on AP Classes

If AP classes truly seek to model the college experience in a high school setting, they should allow unlimited absences.

What a Wonderful Team This Would Be

Don't know much about Super Quiz
Don't know much anatomy
Don't know much about that Shakespeare book
But I do know I'll outscore you
And I know if you outscore me too
What a wonderful team this would be

Don't know much about impromptu
Don't know much in interview
Don't know much about calculus
Don't know what a scantron is for
But I know that one of us has a clue
And if this one could cheat off of you
What a wonderful test this would be

Now, I don't claim to be an "A" student
I wouldn't want to be
For maybe by being a "C" student baby
I can win more medals for me

-- Original Song by Sam Cooke --